Michael Deshayes

During my time at Service NSW, I was involved in numerous customer focused projects as well as management and leadership initiatives. As part of the Business portfolio our aim was set on making things easier for small businesses. The following examples shed some light on the various , design leadership initiatives I have led to enable us to better serve our target audiences.
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Scaling the design team

Understanding the the growth opportunities

Initially, the organisation had grand visions but lacked the capacity. As part of a small team of 3, we needed to scale in order to meet the organisational and customer needs.
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Planning ahead

To get the ball rolling on improving the situation I began to Identify current, potential and future capacity gaps. This helped us estimate for the needed skills, availability and placement of new designers.
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Re-thinking the talent seeking process

In preparation for recruitment, I realised our hiring foundations were not ideal. With an inadequate, legacy hiring process I redesigned the end to end process from the ground up to focus on assessment clarity, candidate quality and candidate experience. This was all whilst in the process of scaling the team. Additionally, onboarding was a 'known-unknown' and rapidly became a focus area for my planning and documentation efforts. To improve our rate of progress, I created autonomy in low risk decisions to empower team members to co-make decisions in hiring. This resulted in more trust and responsibility within the growing team.
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Reflecting on the outcome

Ultimately, the scaled up design team was an immense effort and was rewarding to see the amazing work the team generated after settling in. The  'straight up' team culture is one of the things we're most proud of and allows us to learn, borrow, remix at will without barriers between teams.

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Improving design operations

Understanding the 'organised' chaos

By observing and being involved in the team for some time, it was evident that with high levels of autonomy comes amazing results but can also lead to inefficiency, duplication and general confusion. I led the efforts of firstly understanding our own existing operations, where the gaps were and how we prioritised fixes.
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Introducing processes and guidance

Upon implementing a range of small to large 'fixes' in our processes, tool usage and principles our team to we were able to justify design debt improvements, realise genuine benefits in day-to-day work and promote more open sharing of ideas and assets.

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Design coaching and guidance

People first approach

People are the most important asset to a business and I began to realise we lacked the investment in our teams. Building upon one another's experiences is a powerful way to grow the team both at an individual and collective level. I continually invested in understanding my direct reports and fellow team members to guide them through challenges, learn about their successes and build effective work relationships.